What it Takes to Win the ARGUS University Challenge

The winning team, from left: Austin Dias, Ian Gartrell, Mark Ambrose, Abhishek Mukherjee and Joe Bird ’16 MSRE.

SAN DIEGO—Throwing yourself into the process and being willing to learn, even from your mistakes, were some of the keys to winning the ARGUS University Challenge, a competition among teams from some 40 different business schools in colleges and universities across the country. Mark Ambrose, MSRE ’16, a member of the winning team from the University of San Diego School of Business and its Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate, tells GlobeSt.com. In the seven years the competition has been held, the USD School of Business team has taken first-place on five occasions and second-place on two occasions.

The 2016 team, composed of MSRE students Ambrose, Austin Dias ’16, Ian Gartrell ’16, Abhishek Mukherjee ’16 and Joe Bird ’16, was led by faculty advisor Charles Tu, the Daniel F. Mulvihill professor of commercial real estate. In this year’s competition, teams analyzed a suburban office park owned by a REIT. The REIT was considering whether it should sell, keep the property as-is, or redevelop it into a mixed-use project. In addition to utilizing the information provided in the case, the USD team conducted extensive research on the real estate space market, asset market as well as capital market to help them formulate strategies to maximize the investment’s potential. ARGUS Enterprise was used to model, plan and optimize the investment scenarios to support the team’s recommendations.